Fan Club “Blog” #18: I played The Seven-Part Pact

I played one hell of a TTRPG this month.

This game is called The Seven-Part Pact. It’s enormous. It’s labyrinthine. Apparently some folks have been calling it “The Twilight Imperium of roleplaying games”. And while it won’t be coming to crowdfunding until 2026 at the earliest, you can download the files and play it (or just read it while snorting in delight) right now on the designer’s Patreon.

That designer? Is none other than Jay Dragon, who at some point I started calling “The hitmaker”. This is the author of the acclaimed Sleepaway and Wanderhome, and co-creator of Yezeba’s Bed & Breakfast. I’ve actually got an interview with her coming on the Patreon later this week, so look forward to that!

So, what is Seven-Part Pact?

...Oh boy. Oh god.

Let me start by telling you the (simple) story set-up, and then I’ll explain the (hellish) ludic clockwork that sits underneath it.

The Seven-Part Pact is a fantasy game for up to 7 players. As you sit down, each of you creates a player character, and each of those player characters is a wizards with moon-shattering, society-crushing powers. Also, everyone will be playing a man, because in this game magic can only be practiced by men (or so you all think).

The good news is, you’re all part of a pact. Sounds nice and officious, eh? Nice and civilized. Among its laws, the pact states that magic with such frightening applications as your own must never be shared outside the 7 members of this pact.

The bad news is, this is a game with something to say about the patriarchy, and the entire game tilts your little cabal towards conflict with the wider world, with the laws of the pact itself, with the gods above, with the devil below... and most naturally of all, with one another.

How it feels to be part of the story that follows is something like finding yourself at a wild party, one where all of you can enjoy getting drunk on ultimate power, but before long the apartment starts filling with cigar smoke and it's 4am and you become increasingly queasy at the consequences of all of this until finally, bleary-eyed, you walk into the bathroom to throw up, but when you turn around to lock the door you see that someone’s shooting bath salts into their veins. Except it’s not bath salts, it’s magic spells. When did the pact go so wrong?!

Now, if you’re familiar with Jay Dragon’s other games, which have had (in one way or another) relatively minimalist rules, you might expect the above story structure is more-or-less all you need to know about the game. I might just expect me to add “Oh yeah, and it runs off the Powered by the Apocalypse system” or something.

That is... not where we’re at.

Scroll up again and look at the header image of this article. That was our set-up. Except we only had 6 wizards in our game out of a possible 7, meaning that we only had 86% of the play materials on the table.

I don’t think with a full 7 players, anyone has a table big enough. We’re talking a two-table game, here. Probably multiple rooms.

Pictured above is my personal play area. You can see my cheat sheets (lower left), my character sheets (lower centre), my wizard's personal, unique sourcebook (lower right), my minigame (centre), my tokens (centre left) and my notebook (centre right).

So, yeah. Congratulations to Jay for making what may well be the most ambitiously-structured TTRPG in existence. It is a concatenation of preposterous ideas. It is the Charlie Kelly Pepe Silvia red string meme, but with game mechanics. It is both simply awesome, and I honestly cannot tell you whether I recommend it. More on that later.

So, we've got a few bonkers things going on with this setup. My instinct as a reviewer is to begin by teaching you about the biggest thing, but I can’t do that, because it’s all f***ing big.

So we’ll just start with the fact that every player has their own whole-ass, bespoke board game sat in front of them that. And in Jay’s own words during our interview that I’ll be publishing later this week, farcically, you sort of don’t want to be playing your special personal game. These are just your areas of wizardly responsibility.

I’ve never encountered anything like this in a roleplaying game. These games are obnoxious, they’re rigged to fail, they’re not even necessarily fun... and I’m a little bit in love with them.

So if you’re playing the Warlock (pictured above) then you’re also overseeing the constant scheming and politicking of the King’s court, which involves a lot of... sliding cards around? If you’re playing the Necromancer then you’re preventing the dead from coming back to the lands of the living, which looks like... a tower defense game?

I use question marks because one of the great joys of Seven-Part Pact is that there’s so much shit going on that by design, wizards are going to have no idea how one another's board games work. This is both super amusing as a player, because large chunks of the game are just everyone spent staring down at their own byzantine corner of the store and then someone opposite you goes “Oh, shit, no!”

But it also really situates you in your character as an all-knowing, enigmatic asshole. Everyone has a degree of self-importance (they have this bit of clockwork that only they understand) but also ignorance, and then additionally bias. Because you’re all-too aware of the consequences if you fail at your minigame (the king turns against wizards, the dead come back to life, etc.), but it’s awfully easy to handwave the protestations of the player sat opposite you, whose minigame is doing the equivalent of flashing red lights and producing smoke.

Which I was doing a lot in my game. I was the pact's Faustian, meaning the wizard of us in charge with keeping an eye on a fellow you may have heard of called THE DEVIL. Combating the Devil's various plots and spies took the form of a card game, and the consequences for me losing was my soul getting gobbled up in quarters. Each quarter I lost, the more I became a nemesis for the other wizards.

And then, as you might imagine, it's these seven asymmetrical board games that power the plot, too.

As wizards, you could each reshape the world as you see fit... if you weren’t spending all of your actions each month wrestling with your stupid responsibility. So wizards cut corners, or they fail at their task, or they simply get unlucky, and then a wizard failing at their game has consequences for everybody. So what do your demigods do next? Naturally, you start bickering.

Surely, though, there's a magical solution for the problem that besets you? And so you start thumbing through the absurd, maximalist, slightly preposterous grimoire of spells that the game comes with which is a whole-ass 200 page book... but a fix would require that you all agree on how to solve the problem, and that the spell has no consequences, which you won’t, and it won’t.

True story: In the three days I spent playing Seven-Part Pact my character cast exactly one spell. My Faustian became so afraid of the Devil’s influence on a distant land that I cursed it with a plague that both stopped folks from speaking (which was my intent) and made them blind (which was a happy accident) and filled the land with toads (which was a less-than-happy accident).

Problem solved, kind of? Except every part of the world is the domain of some f***in' wizard, so now all of the companions and family members of one of my fellow PCs were battling a particularly gruesome pandemic and also a lot of toads.

When you do something like this, there’s this twinned elation at the table, first at the world-shaking potency of a great work of magic that the grimoire guides you through, step by step, and then the further elation at what this means for the increasingly plot. Imagine the drama at the next wizard moot!

(Above you can see a player browsing our prototype grimoire, doing one last check of the huge pile of consequences they're about to generate.)

It’s wild that I haven’t mentioned this yet, but 7 Part Pact also has no Game Master, although Jay would prefer you to think of it as “Every player is a GM”.

Basically, each player - in addition to roleplaying their wizard - has ultimate authority when it comes to some facet of the natural world. If you’re the pact’s Heirophant, you make all decisions relating to the common folk and NPCs of the world. As the Faustian, I outlined the negative consequences whenever another wizard fumbled an action. And then sometimes “what happens next” is thrown to the entire table to decide via committee, an exciting and humbling experience where your fellow players - six GMs, and also your six rivals - kick around the most fitting plotline for your scheming character.

That’s a wild way to structure a game, but it tells you something about Seven-Part Pact that in my telling you about it, this "7 GMs" thing is an afterthought. Like, playing this game we’re already reading our own bespoke-ass rulebooks that contains pages and pages and pages on what secrets our character has, what magic objects, what aspects of the greater cosmology only we know, what our homeland is like (but you’re allowed to change it before and during the game), what rules of the game only we have (as the Faustian I had the rules for when the pact wanted to try another wizard for a crime). And then you’re telling me that we’re going to share the GM responsibilities? In another game, that would give you pause for thought. In this game, it’s like you’re learning a foreign language and are told yet another grammar rule that works backwards from how you’re used to. You don’t question it, you don’t even try and understand it, you just say “Got it,” because you're trying to internalise how the stars work or some shit.

That's not a joke. See below the map of the stars.

I could talk more about how this game is structured. I could go into more detail about this starchart in the middle of the table, which rotates like a cursed lazy susan, ruining everyone’s day in sequence, but which wizards can screw with like a DJ scratching a record. I could talk more about the Grimoire of spells that you pass around the table and browse like Satan’s own winelist, which has more content by itself than many RPGs have in their entire rulebook. I could discuss the King's Birthday.

But right now, I don’t want to get lost in all the mechanisms and pulleys of Jay’s design. If you want to hear more about that, you can look forward to the interview coming later this week.

For now, I want to try and answer some more practical questions, just so I can get this blog post out before the end of the day and get back to working on Quinns Quest Season 2. Episode 2 is right around the corner!

Q: Did you say you were playing this game for THREE DAYS?

Yes! Seven Part Pact is feature-complete but it’s undergoing playtesting right now. Actual play scholar Dr. Emily Friedman organised a part retreat, part playtest, and was kind enough to invite me.

I’ll be honest, playing a roleplaying game from like, 10am to 6pm for multiple days in a row is cool and a privileged thing to be able to do, but also it’s exactly as madness-inducing as you think it might be. It is WILD to sit down to pretend to be a wizard at the beginning of day 2 and experience the sensation that you’re sitting down to your second day at the world’s weirdest desk job.

Honestly, if you’ve ever envied the folks doing epic multi-day LARPs but LARPing isn’t your thing, try just taking a long weekend to play a roleplaying game for several days straight. You get further towards that hallucinatory trippiness than you might expect.

(Pictured above: the Mariner's minigame, which is to do with keeping trade routes clear.)

Q: What happened in your game, anyway?

Oh jesus. If I try and describe all of the big events of our game it’ll sound unhinged, as so many roleplaying games do. The wizard at our table playing The Mariner was kept busy feuding with his trapped daughter and endless fish-lookin’ sons. The wizard at our table playing the Sage created a chimera so powerful that when it walked into the wizard moot behind him it was like a nuclear bomb had waddled in on all fours. The Warlock become the mother to a dragon egg, which involved transforming into a woman.

If I have a criticism of Seven Part Pact, in fact, it’s that in the game I played the story felt like it had too many drivers and too little tethering of our plot threads together. I described to Jay that it felt not like seven GMs, but seven protagonists, each with our own storyline, but with no-one at the table who was responsible for ensuring we try and bring one another into our machinations and stories.

In Game of Thrones, for example, every character can’t do a scene without becoming a character in someone else’s story. In my game of Seven Part Pact, at times it felt like our plotlines were running in parallel, like train tracks. Jay actually said that during a lot of her online playtesting, players would treat it like they were listening to a podcast, only locking their attention back into the game when it was their PC's turn.

At the same time, the story I experienced through my character was, for the most part, very satisfying. I played the Faustian as a drunken fool who was also the only person in the room who could see clearly: Every magic spell was a slit through which the devil could creep back into the world. As each month passed, I was to be found increasingly despondent and panicked, and at each moot the other wizards could see in the terror on my character’s face the apocalypse they were bringing about it.

I had a lot of fun!

Q: Cool! So should I download this game and play it?

Aha! Ahaa. Hold on there, sport.

I said I had fun, but that’s because I also - from an administrative perspective - didn’t do anything.

The current version of Seven Part Pact that you can acquire is just some print’n’play materials, and this is a fucking monster of a thing to play if you had the finished box in front of you, let alone manufacture! You’re looking at... I dunno, a solid day of printing, slicing, stapling and organising? To say nothing of raiding all the board games in your house for the different components you need.

I also had the privilege of playing Seven Part Pact without having to teach it. My experience of being onboarded was silky-smooth, but that’s because not just any teacher, but the designer, Jay Dragon, was literally sat at my left hand, providing the quickest path to any rule query being resolved, sometimes cutting the corner entirely to create a new ruling.

So, in no particular order:

• I cannot imagine printing and assembling this game

• I can just about imagine teaching this game, and it seems like a tremendous headache

• I cannot imagine what it’s like to play this game while teaching it simultaneously to five or six people

I’m not saying it’d be a bad experience, especially if you’re at college or funemployed right now and have a ton or free time, I’m just saying that literally, I do not feel confident telling you what to do here. This game is batshit. Jay was literally on Bluesky the other day talking about how she wants to make games that tear at the definition of what a game even is. Proceed with caution. And probably a paper cutter.

Q: Should I download this game and read it?

Now you’re talkin’! Yes, if you're interested, go right ahead and buy it and read, read, read! Jay's a phenomenal writer and the individual booklets for each of the 7 wizards will make for fabulous reading. There's tons of great picklists in there, tons of fabulous lore and rules and just... wizard shit! You'll have a great time.

Q: Should I take a look at the crowdfunding campaign for this game when it launches?

I certainly will. I can't imagine the task of dressing up all of these materials with art design & layout and putting it in a boxed product. It's going to be a Gloomhaven-sized thing, and I expect they'll make it look as big and glamourous as possible in order to market it. I'm very interested to see the finished product.

Will I play the finished game though? Will I review it?

I wonder.

It's funny. When I was working on Shut Up & Sit Down, I'd cover fascinating, giant follies like this in a heartbeat. The people had to know about them! ...but with Quinns Quest, I find myself thinking that this game is just too big. It's impractical. It's silly. I couldn't possibly cover it for the 0.1% of my audience that could get it to the table.

Is that the right editorial stance?

Hmm. Lots to think about.

-- Quinns